Dear Diary,

I lead what most people would call an average life. It is not a life that health fanatics would appraise as the epitome of lifestyles, nor is it probable that my life will ever be credited as anything more than ordinary. In many ways, I am contented with knowing that, maybe even liking it more than I should. I like living the normal life; It helps me appreciate the extraordinary. 

Living the ordinary life, however, can often be regarded with much distaste in my society, where society tells us to live the lives of others, i.e. celebrities. It defines this to be the guidelines for conformity; who you have to be, who you should be and who you are ultimately meant to be like. This is the world I live in: be a somebody, or be a nobody. It is a crude depiction of the expectations of my society, but this is not too far from the reality either. It presents to us an assumption of two mutually exclusive alternatives: either be a somebody – someone who lives a good life or be a nobody – someone who lives a life of little value. However, does and should society decide on what value there is in a person’s life? The answer is simple as it is short. No, society does and should not.

As much as living an ordinary life might seem to contradict the innate quest of most well-to-do humans: the quest of self-actualization, I do still believe that beauty lies, to each our own, in the being of “normal” and “ordinary”. The beauty of going against the common code of conformity, and the beauty in defying and refusing to be bent into someone the society wants me to be. Such a beauty helps me to appreciate who I am not and who I can never be before it points me to who I am meant to be and always had been – myself. In this way, living an ordinary life does not contradict with the quest of self – actualization, but rather helps me to realise it. I am who I make myself to be, and not even society can dictate that. 

So it is with this knowledge, that I realise that I am blessed. Blessed with the wonderful realisation that I have a choice to be who I want to be, free to choose who I am and who I am meant to be. Blessed in the realisation that it can only be thanks to God, that I have been given choices to be make and given a soul that desires to make those choices. 

God is the creator of all things beautiful: Me, and then everything and everyone else around me. He is the creator of the oceans deep and mountains high. The creator of the blueness of the sky and the author of the nighttime stars. He is the creator of the invisible wind, the author of the stormy gales. He is an almighty God, and he is the lover of my soul. God is love, and that realisation is my aptest understanding of the greatest beauty. 

It is as such that I thus know how I should and would choose to live my life. It would not be a life conformed to the world that tells me who I should be, but rather in recognition of the author of beauty, a life consecrated as a testament and a testimony to the beauty of my God. A life, though ordinary and seemingly boring, that will choose to be set apart and beautiful, loving God as he has loved me before the creation of the universe.

In the face of beauty, we are moved to become what it calls us to be.In the face of beauty, we are all moved to respond in the only sound way to respond to love: the reciprocation of love back again.

So yes, I like living the ordinary life; it helps me to appreciate the extraordinary. But I also like living the set apart life, the beautiful life; it helps me appreciate the invisible God I know and choose to love. 

Until the next time I write to you, and Yours Sincerely, Ka Wai